Last night’s update to the Pogo Facebook Connect feature has resolved the privacy issues we’d been discussing yesterday. For players who have both Pogo and Facebook accounts, this is how it all works. (Also it’s worth noting this is probably how it was intended to work.)
If you’ve previously used a Pogo Facebook app — such as the Pogo Games Fanatic app — your accounts are probably “connected”. One way to check if your account is connected is to visit your Profile Privacy Settings (Guestbook, Guestbook Settings, Profile Privacy bar) and look for the section about Facebook. For the purposes of this article, I’ve created a fake Facebook profile (first name Badge, last name Fairy) and am connecting it to a previously-established Pogo profile.
If your settings include the information in the screenshot above, your Facebook and Pogo accounts are connected. By default, the box to use your photo and name from Facebook is unchecked. (Yay privacy!) If you do not see the Facebook information in your Profile Privacy settings, your accounts are not connected.
As you can see, for a connected account, as long as the checkbox is not checked, your Facebook information (read: your name) will not be displayed on your profile when others view it. The drawback to this is that your Facebook friends will not be able to find you automatically and add you as a friend on Pogo. You can still always just tell them your username and have them add you the “old-fashioned way”.
Once your account is connected to Facebook, when you view your profile you will see this box:
Don’t panic! As long as that checkbox up there is unchecked, you are the only one who can see this information. If you were to check the box, anyone that has permission to see your profile (by default, everyone — but you can set those settings in the same place as the Facebook settings, see the screenshot above) will be able to see it too.
No matter if you’ve checked the checkbox or not, all connected accounts will display the Facebook ‘f’ icon next to their profiles in others’ friends lists:
Now, on to the fun stuff! If your accounts are connected (it doesn’t matter if your name and photo are being displayed on your Pogo profile or not), you can share badges you’ve earned on your Facebook profile. To do so, go to Badge Central and visit “My Collection”. Choose a badge you’d like to flaunt, and click the small Facebook ‘f’ icon next to it. You’ll be walked through the posting process and voila, your badge will show up on your Wall and on your friends’ home pages:
The option to publish a badge to Facebook is also available in the pop-up window when you earn a badge. You may want to be sparing with this feature, you have the ability to publish any number of badges you have ever earned or may earn in the future (the throttling is done by Facebook, but it’s not very strict). In writing this article, I spammed my Wall and friends list with 8 or 9 posts of the same badge, which would probably be pretty annoying to any Facebook friends you may have (good thing Badge Fairy has no friends)!
So, now that it’s working as intended (and your privacy is safe and secure once again), what do you think of these new features?
